Museum

Lead designer David Adjaye, lead architect Philip Freelon and J. Max
Bond Jr. won the 2009 design competition for the five-acre site.

“We felt the weight just about every day, because we knew we were
building something, not for the next ten years but the next 100 years that
would represent our culture,” Freelon told “CBS This Morning.”

Credit: Alan Karchmer

National Mall

“It’s taken 200 years to complete this master plan,” Adjaye said
of D.C.’s National Mall. “And last, but not least, I think this museum
completes it -- makes you understand what the founding fathers were trying to
achieve with the notion of ‘palaces of culture’ to educate the people. I think
this museum comes at a very opportune time, to finish this master plan and to
send it into the future.”

Credit: Alan Karchmer

Latticework

Though the building follows traditional classical Greco-Roman forms,
its capping “corona” was inspired by the three-tiered crowns used in West
African Yoruban art. The building is wrapped in ornamental bronze-colored metal
latticework. And unlike other buildings on the Mall, there is no marble.

Credit: Alan Karchmer

Museum

“The museum really is not just about making it any shape for the sake
of it,” Adjaye said. “It really tries to make from the very
silhouette a story for people to ask why, and it really tries to bring you back
to Central and West Africa so you think about the kind of empires of that time
and the history that the African American community have.”

Credit: Alan Karchmer

View

“The site is really important,” said Freelon. “If you
think about the Mall and the other buildings that are important to Washington, this five-acre site is the very last site that
could accommodate something like this. So, in many ways, it’s going to be there
as a reminder of the importance of this institution, because of its location, literally
within the shadow of the Washington Monument.”

Credit: Alan Karchmer

Interior

An interior view of the new museum.

Credit: Alan Karchmer

Slave shackles

The museum’s 11 massive galleries display, in total, more than 30,000
priceless artifacts spanning 400 years.

Among them: Wrought iron ankle shackles, of
the type used to restrain enslaved people aboard ships crossing the Atlantic
from Africa to the Americas during the Middle Passage, mid-1800s.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Salve bill of sale

An official receipt, dated Dec.
23, 1835, for the sale of a 16-year-old Negro girl named Polly for $600. This
bill of sale transferred ownership of Polly from Martin Bridgeman to William H.
Mood, both from Jackson County, in the territory of Arkansas. A gift of Candace
Greene.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Slave cabin

This weatherboard-clad slave cabin
dating from the early 1800s was used at Point of Pines Plantation on Edisto
Island, S.C. A gift of the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Nat Turner's Bible

A Bible owned by Nat Turner, who
led a slave revolt in 1831. Turner and his followers
killed at least 55 whites. But slaves also protected a woman who would become
the great-great-grandmother of Maurice and Mark
Person, descendants of one of the oldest white families in
Virginia.

The family heirloom - like a majority of pieces in the museum’s collection
- was donated by ordinary people who pulled them out of their basements, attics
and churches.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Hymnal

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Tuskegee Airmen

This vintage, open-cockpit
biplane, a Boeing-Stearman PT-13D Kaydet,
c. 1944, was used at Alabama’s renowned Tuskegee Institute to train African
American pilots for service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, as part of the Tuskegee Airmen.

Credit: Michael R. Barnes/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Satchmo

A brass Selmer trumpet owned
by Louis Armstrong, c. 1946.

Credit: Donald E. Hurlbert/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Bombing debris

A collection of glass
shards and a shotgun shell, collected from the gutter outside the 16th Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham, Ala., where a terrorist bombing killed four young girls
on September 15, 1963. It would be more than a decade before a case was brought
against a former Ku Klux Klansman for his part in the bombing.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Rosa Parks

A dress that Rosa Parks was
making shortly before she was arrested for not giving up her seat on a segregated
bus in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955. The dress is part of the Black Fashion Museum
Collection that was donated to NMAAHC.

Credit: Michael R. Barnes/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Ann Lowe

Credit: Michael R. Barnes/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Cassis Clay

Cassis
Clay’s boxing headgear from the famed 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach. After beating
Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964 to become the world champion, Clay converted to
Islam and became Muhammad Ali.

Credit: Alex Jamison/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Sammy Davis Jr.

A pair of tap shoes worn by entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry’s Cadillac - part of the singer’s
personal fleet of Cadillacs - driven during the 1986 filming of the documentary
“Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Carl Lewis

A jersey worn by track star Carl Lewis during the 1984 Olympic Games. Lewis won four gold medals in Los Angeles, and would win an additional five golds and a silver at the Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta Games.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Michael Jackson

Michael
Jackson’s fedora
worn during his Victory Tour in 1984. The hat was caught by an audience member during a concert in Giants’ Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Credit: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Gabrielle Douglas

Items from the career of Olympic
gymnast Gabby Douglas, including a leotard from her first competitive season (in
2003); the grip bag, wrist tape and uneven-bar grips she used at the 2012
London Olympics, where she won two gold medals; the ticket to the Olympics used
by Douglas’ mother, Natalie Hawkins; and Douglas’ Olympic venue credentials.

Credit: Michael R Barnes/Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Cuture

Museum of African American History

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture officially opens on September 24, 2016.